The Future of Food

Growing, producing, and shipping food are big contributors to climate change. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, about one-third of the global greenhouse gas emissions come from the world's food systems. Food is "an instigator of climate change and it's a victim of climate change," said Jessica Fanzo, director of the Johns Hopkins Global Food Ethics and Policy Program and author of Can Fixing Dinner Fix the Planet?, in an interview with Mike Walter of CGTN.

One of the solutions is changing individuals' diets, what Fanzo and fellow food researchers from the EAT-Lancet Commission call a "planetary health diet." The diet is high in fruits and vegetables, as well as beans, legumes, nuts, and seeds, while food from animal sources, including meat, fish, and dairy, are low. Not only is this sustainable for the planet, "it's a very plant-based diet that meets nutritional needs, decreases your risk for non-communicable diseases like cardiovascular disease and diabetes and stroke, all these long-term, chronic, quite costly diseases," Fanzo said.

Inextricably bound together by food

This blog was originally posted on the OECD’s Forum.

Three of the biggest problems we face in the twenty-first century are (1) the burden of chronic, costly diseases such as diabetes and hypertension; (2) the consequences of climate change and natural resource degradation; and (3) the massive economic and social inequities that exist within and among nations. All three are directly related to the food we eat.

Our food systems are a wonder of the modern world. They efficiently supply almost eight billion people with enough food to survive. However, the foods we eat also contribute to increasingly common and burdensome health problems worldwide. Although hunger rates have been decreasing over the past 25 years, many people remain food insecure—not knowing when and from where their next meal will come. Many women and children still struggle with undernutrition, and at the same time, obesity and diet-related chronic diseases are rising everywhere. Concurrently, food systems are placing a growing burden on the health of our planet’s environment. They’re responsible for roughly 10 to 24 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, which are increasing temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, and acidifying the oceans. At the same time, agricultural production is susceptible to a changing climate, which is becoming increasingly challenging to produce enough food for a growing population. In choosing what to eat, we’re making decisions that have both short- and long-term equity implications for our global citizenry. Decisions on the efficiency and direction of food systems inevitably mean that moral and ethical trade-offs will have to be made. For example, can we sustain both human and planetary health? And, if not, what trade-offs are we willing to live with, who gets priority, and who will be left behind?    

Every society is impacted by food—it’s the lifeblood that ever shapes individual health and vast cultures daily. But without the right amount or quality of foods to eat, things can go very wrong very quickly, especially when climate disruption and pandemics devastate the planet. And the decisions about these foods—from how they’re grown or raised, how much packaging surrounds them, and whether or not they are thrown out—impact our planet in profound ways, from its physical environment to what it supports: the millions of plants, insects, and animals, including us.

In my book, Can Fixing Dinner Fix the Planet? I articulate some of the larger social and political systems that need to change to support human and planetary needs. No simple solution exists to create healthy, sustainable, and equitable diets. A constellation of different approaches and strategies—operating from the local level to global supply chains, targeting different people and organizations—will be necessary. Many solutions are available now and are ready to scale. Implementing these solutions will require individual awareness and advocacy, governments’ political will, and private sector investment. Having spent a lot of time in communities living in Eastern Africa and countries of Asia such as Timor-Leste, Nepal, and Myanmar, I am left with a lot of hope for what is possible in the face of immense risks. The actions the global “we” take in the next few years will set the stage for the future of food systems and the future of life on this planet. If we don’t address the planet's needs, this shared ecosystem made up of humans, and a vast array of other animal and plant species will struggle to survive.

This book was written while the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 spread across the globe like wildfire, giving few clues to where we still stand within the pandemic. Are we at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of its wrath? What’s become apparent is that the pandemic has shaken the global health system to its core and is having ramifications in every other sector, too, including the worldwide food and financial systems. As COVID-19 continues to survive, mutate, and spread from person to person, community to community, and nation to nation, it illustrates just how interconnected we all are—how what happens to one person can impact thousands, even millions. It also sheds light on how ultimately fragile a massive engine like the international food supply can be.

What I’ve learned over the years, and what the COVID-19 pandemic has shown me, is that we’re inextricably bound together by food. We spend a good portion of our days considering, shopping for, cooking, eating food, and cleaning up what remains. In some parts of the world, eating involves walking some distance to get water and growing or raising what’s eaten. All our collective actions and decisions have ripple effects across countries and, often, around the world. Because food is something every person interacts with every day, why is it not a higher priority for world leaders to ensure that this food nourishes citizens and is produced in sustainable ways? It baffles me.

When COVID-19 is in the rearview mirror, what will we look like as a human society? Will we be better informed, ready, and more resilient before the next pandemic or climate shock strikes?

The food security challenges we face are not trivial. As global citizens, we are at a critical world juncture amid the perils of climate change, pandemics, and political upheaval. Within the swirling chaos, the opportunities for equitable, healthy, and sustainable food systems are substantial but will require that high-quality science be translated into policy faster than ever before. I’m optimistic considering the many scientists and inventors around the world who are helping course correct the problems we face and put us on the right track. Research can bring wholesale changes to action and politics. Right this minute, many researchers are working tirelessly in field stations, farms, labs, conference rooms, and classrooms to establish clear understandings of factors that feed the problems of global food systems and institute solutions to be taken up by individuals, organizations, and private organizations companies, and nations. Politicians, business owners, and citizens of the world must then do their parts to help. This is our chance to design and construct the observable ending and move toward a more sustainable world, coexisting in accord with the planet. I’m hopeful, and I trust that human perseverance, creativity, and ingenuity will pull us through to the other side.

Can Fixing Dinner Fix the Planet? Is available at Johns Hopkins University Press.

Public Broadcasting Services has done a service for food history

I love the U.S.’s Public Broadcasting Services. It is a bit under-appreciated, as compared to BBC, but they produce quality series like the iconic Ken Burns documentaries as one example. One of my favorite shows is American Experience. They have done some fantastic documentaries on individuals relevant to the Food Archive. Let’s take the environment. They had a wonderful series on Rachel Carson, who wrote the seminal book Silent Spring in 1962 that sparked the environmental movement. The documentary gives a fair portrait of her complexity and how her writings revolutionized our relationship to the natural world. There was also a thoughtful documentary on chef, advocate, and restaurant owner, Alice Waters. While her vision of the global food system may be out of reach for many, she has been highly influential on the local and organic food movement originating in the groovy hippie days of yesteryears. The scene where she intimately discusses a small garden tomato in her hand is priceless. And last, and just released, is the Norman Borlaug doc on “The Man Who Tried to Feed the World.” It highlights the positive and negative consequences of one man’s single-minded vision to start the Green Revolution and conquer hunger once and for all. I wish I would have had this documentary last year when I taught my class on rural development. And if you have any bandwidth left in you, I highly recommend this great documentary “A Full Bowl” (not PBS) on Alan Berg, World Banker, who influenced the international undernutrition agenda. He was not only a great thinker and writer, but shaped the nutrition agenda in the 1970s and 80s, and his work and issues are still relevant today. He sort of reminds me, at least in his motivation, of Borlaug. Now, you might say, I can’t access the PBS series unless I support my local station. They need your support, particularly with the lack of finances from our current, shitty US government. So go out and support PBS and be entertained for hours…

The NOT Best of 2021 Best Book List

I am often asked for recommendations for mainstream (less academic) books about food politics and systems. There are so many out there, but here are some that I really enjoyed. As some of you know, I am a bit insane about books (my better half is a book publisher). I also like non-food books and spoke about that on The Reading Lists. I also wrote two of my own books last year: Can Fixing Dinner Fix the Planet? has been published by Johns Hopkins University Press. Global Food Systems, Diets, and Nutrition: Linking Science, Economics and Policy has been published by Palgrave MacMillan. Anyways, here it goes…

Classic food politics books by well-known writers:

Book addict…

Food Politics by Marion Nestle

Soda Politics by Marion Nestle

Unsavory Truth by Marion Nestle

The Omnivore’s Dilemma - Michael Pollan

Niche food books:

Salt by Mark Kurlansky

Cod by Mark Kurlansky

Four Fish by Paul Greenberg

Hippie Food by John Kauffman

Untold History of Ramen by George Solt

The Story of Sushi by Trevor Corson

The Secret Life of Lobsters by Trevor Corson

Sweetness and Power by Sidney Mintz

America’s food system books:

Salt Sugar Fat by Michael Moss

Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser

Drive-Thru Dreams: A Journey Through the Heart of America’s Fast-Food Kingdom by Adam Chandler

Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How Can Prevent It by Tom Philpott

The Secret Life of Groceries by Benjamin Lorr

Diets, health, and ethics-related books:

The Way We Eat Now by Bee Wilson

Weighing in by Julie Guthman

How to Eat by David Katz and Mark Bittman

Eat, Drink and Be Healthy by Walter Willett

In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan

Vitamania by Catherine Price

Gulp by Mary Roach

Food justice books:

You and I Eat The Same by Chris Ying

We Fed an Island: The True Story of Rebuilding Puerto Rico, One Meal at a Time by Jose Andres

Black Food Matters by Hanna Garth

Food Justice Now! By Joshua Sbicca

The Ethics of What We Eat by Peter Singer

Food and climate change books:

Food 5.0: How We Feed the Future by Robert Saik

Future Foods by David McClements

Politics of Food by Dani Burrows and Aaron

Full Planet, Empty Plates by Lester Brown

The Fate of Food by Amanda Little

Slow Catastrophes by Rebecca Jones

International food politics books:

The End of Food by Paul Roberts

Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine by Alex De Waal

Will Africa Feed China by Deborah Brautigam

Food Politics by Robert Paarlberg

The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles Mann

The Last Hunger Season by Roger Thurow

Eating NAFTA by Alyshia Galvez

Just Food by James McWilliams

Classic food politics books by well-known writers:

Book addict…

Food Politics by Marion Nestle

Soda Politics by Marion Nestle

Unsavory Truth by Marion Nestle

The Omnivore’s Dilemma - Michael Pollan

Niche food books:

Salt by Mark Kurlansky

Cod by Mark Kurlansky

Four Fish by Paul Greenberg

Hippie Food by John Kauffman

Untold History of Ramen by George Solt

The Story of Sushi by Trevor Corson

The Secret Life of Lobsters by Trevor Corson

Sweetness and Power by Sidney Mintz

America’s food system books:

Salt Sugar Fat by Michael Moss

Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser

Drive-Thru Dreams: A Journey Through the Heart of America’s Fast-Food Kingdom by Adam Chandler

Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How Can Prevent It by Tom Philpott

The Secret Life of Groceries by Benjamin Lorr

Diets, health, and ethics-related books:

The Way We Eat Now by Bee Wilson

Weighing in by Julie Guthman

How to Eat by David Katz and Mark Bittman

Eat, Drink and Be Healthy by Walter Willett

In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan

Vitamania by Catherine Price

Gulp by Mary Roach

Food justice books:

You and I Eat The Same by Chris Ying

We Fed an Island: The True Story of Rebuilding Puerto Rico, One Meal at a Time by Jose Andres

Black Food Matters by Hanna Garth

Food Justice Now! By Joshua Sbicca

The Ethics of What We Eat by Peter Singer

Food and climate change books:

Food 5.0: How We Feed the Future by Robert Saik

Future Foods by David McClements

Politics of Food by Dani Burrows and Aaron

Full Planet, Empty Plates by Lester Brown

The Fate of Food by Amanda Little

Slow Catastrophes by Rebecca Jones

International food politics books:

The End of Food by Paul Roberts

Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine by Alex De Waal

Will Africa Feed China by Deborah Brautigam

Food Politics by Robert Paarlberg

The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles Mann

The Last Hunger Season by Roger Thurow

Eating NAFTA by Alyshia Galvez

Just Food by James McWilliams

Kick around in the wreck

20 years. What do 20 years do to one’s memory? Why are some things so crystal clear and other things, fuzzy? As Julien Baker said: “Sometimes I think I needed to do that, to really just kick around in the wreck and the gross stuff and really see what was there instead of trying to ignore that it existed.”

So let’s kick around in the wreck. September 11, 2001 (aka 911) is as clear to me as that beautiful, early September morning filled with clear blue skies in Gotham. We lived there then.

We heard about “it” on the radio at work but thought the DJs were pulling our leg. Typical prankster stuff. Then, we looked directly south, out of our building from the 30th floor. Straight down that wee island to see the due torri smoking. Then, their tumbling, tumbling 10-second fall. There were tears mixed with fear and just a quiet stagger. Are we at war we asked ourselves? It turns out, we were, and it was only the beginning.

After “it” happened, we walked 12 miles from work to get home through a surreal and stunned city.  It was devastating. It was shocking. It was a wake-up call. Yes, we were not liked by our neighbors. Yes, we were vulnerable. Yes, we were turning a corner.

Many perished with over 1,000 who still remain unidentified. Many were named heroes. Those bagpipes...Many families were devastated. Many remembered our united compassion in everyday gestures among those sticky city streets. But we, our city, somewhat recovered, albeit with scars and scratches all over. Our country, on the other hand, did not and has not. In an attempt to “never forget,” our nation created catastrophic missteps in what our then-president called, “the freedom agenda” resulting in disastrous outcomes for Iraq and Afghanistan.

But I won’t dwell on that. I will focus on that day, and the weeks after, when time truly stood still for some of us living in the big apple. It changed our worldview forever. Immediately after, there was shock. We were shocked that someone could take an everyday thing—something that transports you to other places—and turn it into a bomb essentially. We were shocked that those iconic buildings could crumble so easily. We were shocked that more people didn’t die—maybe the hijackers miscalculated New Yorkers in that most don’t get to work before 9 am and that day, was a primary election in the city. We were shocked that the city that never sleeps went ghostly dormant for months.

Weeks, months and now years after, there was change. “It” changed everything. We invented a new heightened security across every sector of society. New York redesigned itself and many looked to neighboring boroughs to spread towards like Queens, Brooklyn, and Jersey. Right at that time, and for a few years after, the music coming out of NY was the soundtrack of our lives, and seeing bands like Interpol, the Strokes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs in small clubs helped us forget. The Yanks made it to the World Series but just couldn’t pull off that win that we so desperately needed.

But time moves on and we promised we would “never forget.” But never forget exactly what? I never totally understood when my parents talked about how they knew exactly where they were when they heard about JFK’s assassination. On that morning, September 11, 2001, at 8:52, I will forever remember where I was when those DJs said, “we are getting information that a commercial airline has just hit the north tower about 5 minutes ago.” By 9:03 a second plane hit the south tower. One hour and 45 minutes later, those forbidding towers and all the souls in it, around it, and staring it at were a memory that we can’t forget—playing back in our mind as a series of images with William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops running in the background. 20 years later.

The mavens

Food is everywhere. You can find it in almost every store and street corner (whether someone can afford it is for another blog entry). There are food blogs, food podcasts, food documentaries, food travel shows, food cooking shows, food apps, food zines, food mags, food porn…I could go on and on. People tweet, post, and hyperbolize about food, and are watching more cooking than actually doing cooking. Go figure.  Food in and of itself has become entertainment. It is less about people eating healthy and spending quality time on preparing and sharing food, and more about bragging rights. It has become a vehicle for snobbery and status but also, social aggression and competition. In a New York Times piece alluding to food as high art, “Nobody cares if you know about Mozart or Leonardo anymore, but you had better be able to discuss the difference between ganache and couverture.”

Much of the mainstream food system writing and pontificating is from authors who do not have traditional training in science and instead are journalists or writers, some coming from the cooking/restaurant sector. Many chefs are now TV stars in their own right and authors of famous books—and not just cookbooks. Many of these writers act as advocates and have developed celebrity status personalities. They often write about nutrition issues in a more ideological sense, taking parcels of select data to tell their story. The debates on the health of organic foods, GMOs, and industrialization have all been written about: less on the science, more on a belief system of what the food system should ideally look like, but usually only does so for the few elite. They have become the mavens of the food world.

“Nutritionism”— a reductive understanding of nutrients as the key indicators of healthy food—has created much confusion for consumers, leaving journalists, such as Michael Pollan—author of the infamous Ominovores Dilemma—to feed the public digestible answers to the most vexing global food system problems. Pollan along with many other writers (think Bittman, Waters, Petrini, Andres) have effectively opened a new dialogue about food systems, how we (un)consciously eat food, and how the individual can not only eat healthier, nutritious foods but within a healthier food system as well. It took someone like Michael Pollan to distill the complexity of nutrition science into one, simple message that resonated with the public: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Many of these food journalists argue that the nutrition field and nutrition scientists have largely failed the global population, leaving people utterly confused and lost in the swampy, ultra-processed junk food abyss.

Pollan, who has now moved onto the world of psychedelics, further explained:

“In the case of nutritionism, the widely shared but unexamined assumption is that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient. From this basic premise flow several others. Since nutrients, as compared with foods, are invisible and therefore slightly mysterious, it falls to the scientists (and to the journalists through whom the scientists speak) to explain the hidden reality of foods to us. To enter a world in which you dine on unseen nutrients, you need lots of expert help. But expert help to do what, exactly? This brings us to another unexamined assumption: that the whole point of eating is to maintain and promote bodily health. Hippocrates’s famous injunction to ”let food be thy medicine” is ritually invoked to support this notion.”

Gary Taubes, a science writer/journalist, and low carb diet advocate argues:

“The 600,000 articles — along with several tens of thousands of diet books — are the noise generated by a dysfunctional research establishment. Because the nutrition research community has failed to establish reliable, unambiguous knowledge about the environmental triggers of obesity and diabetes, it has opened the door to a diversity of opinions on the subject, of hypotheses about cause, cure, and prevention, many of which cannot be refuted by the existing evidence. Everyone has a theory. The evidence doesn’t exist to say unequivocally who’s wrong.”

Tit for tat, scientists also poo poo on these journalists and find their prose problematic. First, some scientists argue that the Pollans of the world interpretation of science is filled with individual dietary purity. Their idea is to bring food systems back into one’s control, into one’s environment. This is such a difficult prospect for so many people around the world, particularly for those who are suffering from hunger or are struggling to make ends meet and have no voice, no agency. Second, some scientists call these food journalists “agri-intellectuals” who boast more about what should be considered healthy and sustainable production systems without a lot of thought about how farms really operate, and farmer families’ daily struggles, inequities, and the difficulties in earning a living growing food. And last, some find their writing just disconnected from reality and instead, drowning in Americana-centric, navel-gazing arguments with a lack of focus on the perverse political and structural systems that underpin how our globalized food supply is governed that can’t be unraveled by growing your own herb garden.

Norman Borlaug, the agronomist who was largely responsible for the Green Revolution in Asia and Latin America said:

“Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”

Yikes. I wouldn’t go that far Norman…but I see your point. I think…While Norman wasn’t referring to journalists per se, he was referring to lobbyists/advocates/policy wonks that also take the “I know what’s best” high road. The point is, while we scientists can complain all we want about who is shaping decisions and the psyche of the general public, we too need to get better at messaging. We need to be savvier at influencing. We need to use the evidence in ways that convince others to take action and make a change.

I wish I could write as convincingly as Pollan does. I truly do. Wouldn’t it be cool if journalists and scientists got together, shared science, ideas, and information, and wrote joint articles and books? The incentive structures would need to change, but the output could be powerful. Now that would be mavenizing!

Food Systems Dashboard: A Place to Navigate Food Data

By Jess Fanzo and Ty Beal

The world will need to increase its food production by more than 50% and reduce food loss and waste to meet the nutritional needs of the world’s population by 2050. In the context of the broad global trends of population growth, climate, and malnutrition including undernutrition and obesity, this is and will continue to be a massive feat. This transformation will require smarter technology and more sustainable and regenerative food production practices that make efficient use of natural resources, waste less, and provide access to healthier diets. The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed an additional level of pressure on food systems. It has highlighted the strong interconnections between food and health systems, exacerbated economic inequities, and revealed inequities in who has access to healthy foods and healthcare.

copyright: MIT

There is a lot being asked of food systems to transform. They must provide healthy diets. They must be environmentally sustainable. They must ensure sufficient livelihoods for those working in the food system. They must support societal traditions. They must be equitable. But how do we ensure that food systems are addressing these multiple goals? Without strong data to track their progress, it’s often difficult for governments and businesses to make improvements, respond to problems, and examine trade-offs depending on what priorities are invested in. Decision-makers need reliable information to be able to make evidence-based, informed decisions. Understanding how all the vast components of food systems link up and interact makes for a complex web to navigate.

There have been various efforts undertaken to improve the quality, access, and sophistication of food systems data. Several global databases and indices have been created that provide food-related data each with its own strengths, such as the Food Sustainability Index, Food and Agriculture (FAO) Hand in Hand, FAOSTAT, International Food Policy Research Institute’s (IFPRI) Global Food Security Portal, among others.

A new addition to the data revolution on food systems is the Food Systems Dashboard. It describes food systems by bringing together extant data across more than 200 indicators drawn from more than 40 sources for nearly every country and territory in a visually appealing, user-friendly platform. These sources, which are both public and private, include United Nations agencies, the World Bank, Consultative Group for International Agriculture Research (CGIAR), Euromonitor, and cross-country project-based datasets. The data provide insights into different aspects of food systems that are not commonly included together in other food systems data visualization tools, thus allowing users to understand them in a more comprehensive, democratized way. The Dashboard includes indicators across a wide range of sectors—agriculture, food prices, retail, marketing, diets, nutrition, health, climate change, urbanization, poverty, literacy, and others—that operate within, connect to, and interact with dynamics and complexity of food systems.

With all of these fantastic indices, portals, and dashboards out there to make food data more accessible, there are still limitations.

• First, many indicators, including those on consumer behavior and food safety, lack data for the majority of countries globally. And the data that is available often lacks innovation. Crowdsourcing, real-time monitoring, big data are all underutilized or not accessible in food systems research.

• Second, along with data gaps, the data typically exist only at the national level. There is a clear need for more detailed, subnational food systems data that are reconciled and harmonized with national statistics. Food systems are incredibly diverse within a country and require nuanced assessments using local data to adequately characterize their dynamics and local characteristics.

• Third, very few databases provide an assessment of the performance of national or subnational food systems across a range of outcomes nor do they provide any policy recommendations on how to transform food systems to achieve a set of outcomes.

• Fourth, dashboards and indices don’t necessarily show how the data interact or the dynamic relationships—what are the trade-offs if one part of the system is prioritized over another?

Despite the burden we’re placing on food systems to deliver across many goals of sustainable development, we still know relatively little about them. This is ironic being that the UN is calling for a “Food Systems Summit” in about two months. The Food Systems Dashboard and the many other tools out there aim to change that by improving the ability to understand food systems, diagnose where they are strong or weak, and help decide which policies are feasible to transform food systems toward better dietary, health, environmental, and economic outcomes in the near term and for the future.

the trials and tribulations of consensus

@FAO CFS

The Rome-based Committee on World Food Security (CFS) formally adopted “Voluntary Guidelines on Food Systems and Nutrition” (VGFSN) in February of 2021. Resulting from a five-year inclusive multi-stakeholder consultation and negotiation process informed by the scientific evidence of the CFS High-Level Panel of Experts, these Guidelines represent a tool that governments, UN agencies, civil society, private sector, financial institutions, and other development actors can use when developing policies and interventions to address malnutrition through a holistic ‘food systems’ perspective.

“The Guidelines will be used to support the development of coordinated, multi-sectoral national policies, laws, programs, and investment plans to enable safe and healthy diets through sustainable food systems. The VGFSN includes a wide range of recommendations of actions to promote transparent and accountable governance, sustainable food supply chains, access to healthy diets, food safety across sustainable food systems, nutrition education, gender equality, and resilient food systems in humanitarian contexts.”

Why do I bring this up? Well, I led a team of 10 experts that produced the High-Level Panel of Experts Report on Food Systems and Nutrition report, way back in 2017, which served as the backbone of the VGFSN. I will write another blog in the near future on why the use of “high level” or “expert group” is problematic in so many ways…

I learned a few things having been engaged in this 5-year process full of trial and tribulation:

1. Seeking solidarity: UN processes take a long time to come to a consensus. There are plenary and open working group discussions, public forums, and backdoor lobbying. And imagine getting consensus during COVID when all the negotiating was being undertaken on zoom zombie. Not easy. Talk about death by dialogue…

2. Lacking teeth: While the VGFSN are important in that they provide recommendations for countries, they are still voluntary and non-binding. Meaning, they don’t have any teeth. They can be easily ignored and cherry-picked.

3. Naming names: Words and definitions matter. A lot. Many tears were shed and arduous time was spent arguing over such words and their meaning like:

   • Healthy diets

   • Unhealthy diets

   • Nutritious foods

   • Food systems

   • Sustainable food systems

4. Having voice: Not everyone agreed but everyone was heard. Civil society, governments, private sector, UN agencies. Everyone.

5. Falling flat: All actors need to be engaged in the process, their endorsement, and the carrying out of VGFSN or else, they fall flat.

6. Knowing Knowledge: Evidence can vary by type and is interpreted in different ways. Evidence coming from randomized controlled trials is not always the highest valued data. Indigenous peoples and community knowledge can be powerful and just as convincing to policymakers.

7. Glocalization: Countries need to decide which Guidelines are relevant for their context, how they will enact them, who is responsible, and what impact they want to have. So while the global dialogue is important, local action is even more crucial. And feeding that local experience back to the global conversation is even more important.

The VGFSN should be seen as a global norm of reference in the governance of food systems because they are the first of an internationally negotiated set of guidelines on food systems that have navigated the complex, global web of competing interests, values, and evidence in which members of the CFS have come to a common ground. And THAT is, well, something.

Bringing back community agriculture services

With food insecurity rising worldwide and nutrition-related illnesses proliferating, countries want to encourage healthier eating. But how can they ensure people are able to buy and prepare diverse, nutritious foods when farmers produce so little of them? National agricultural policies are generally designed to support the cultivation of staple grains such as corn and rice, some oils, and sugar. A recent paper shows that 1/3 of global farms cultivated maize and 1/5 cultivated wheat alone! These foods feed the world amply, and cheaply, but some in the form of highly processed foods.

@FAO

Another issue is the significant loss and waste of perishable fruits and vegetables, meat and dairy products because of inadequate food storage, poor roads, and people’s lack of access to modes of preserving food for long-term storage. Such inefficiencies along the food supply chain drive up the cost and limit the supply of nutritious, fresh foods in rural and urban areas alike.  In Ethiopia for example, perishable foods such as eggs, dairy, and fish are 8-10 times more expensive than starchy staple calories due to supply constraints.

Turning around such entrenched food systems may seem daunting. But it can be done, beginning at the grass-roots level by improving community-based agriculture extension programs. Extension workers are “door-to-door” or farm-to-farm advisers who translate agriculture science into practical applications for farmers. They help solve problems and provide the training and technology farmers need to improve their operations profitably. Extensionists, as they are called, can also be critical mediators in times of natural disasters or outbreaks of disease among livestock.

A study done in 2014 by the Global Forum for Rural Advisory Services estimated there are 1,059,528 extension agents worldwide, but that could be an underestimate. The range of extension agents in each country varies, with some countries having very few—Barbados has 6—whereas other countries have more—China has 615,000. But, of course, that depends on the number of farmers in the country and how many people each extension agent serves.

Ideally, extensionists can steer farmers toward cultivating more nutritious foods and help them do so profitably. They can guide farmers to save heirloom seeds and improve agronomic practices to produce nutritious crops such as horticulture and raising poultry and goats. They can provide training to farmer families on food preparation and nutrition. They can help farmers adopt cultivation and fertilization practices that protect the environment, limit greenhouse-gas emissions, and help store carbon in the soil. And last, they can advise on post-harvest and storage technologies to minimize food loss on farms.

However, in many countries, they lack the training, tools, transportation, and communication tools to reach farmers. Nutrition training provided to extension agents at agricultural technical schools and universities is ineffective and inadequate, which impedes the ability of agents to identify nutritional needs and provide advice or solutions. They also do not have tools to share with communities nor the training to raise awareness of nutrition as a priority.

In many countries, extensionists also lack the tools that would help them work efficiently with more farmers. For example, in some parts of rural Africa, extension agents do not have mobile phones (or top-ups) to contact farmers about real-time issues like food prices in regional markets or motorbikes to reach far-flung communities. With COVID-19, many extensionists cannot get out to the field, so in places like China and Iran, extensionists are using smartphones and the radio to communicate market information and technical support along with public health safety. Farm Radio International is working with 1,000 stations in Africa to help get out information through extension agents.

It starts at the university level—improving extension curricula in universities or after high-school technical training schools. Investments in refresher certification programs for extension agents are needed in most places globally as technologies change and the latest science and technological know-how on agronomy, nutrition, and climate science tools become available. Continual updates to training modules of extension agents such as the New Extensionist Nutrition Learning Kit developed in Rwanda can strengthen training in nutrition within agriculture. Many local non-governmental organizations can provide this training along with the Food and Agriculture Organization in partnership with Ministries of Agriculture.

Techniques employed by extension agents such as peer-to-peer engagement through model farmers, community champions using a “train-the-trainer” approach, or the “walk-and-talk” methodology, wherein agents interact with client farmers through hands-on demonstrations. One example could be forest walks with farmers. Extension agents could teach farmers how to harvest wild, nutrient-dense foods, followed by demonstrations in preparing and incorporating the food into conventional dishes. The International Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD) has a program, The Last Mile, which is expected to engage 15,000 extension agents in 18 countries to provide business and market-oriented skills to over 1.5 million smallholder farmers over the next five years. 

Last, women extension agents should be promoted and empowered. Only 15% of extension agents are women, and only 5% of women farmers reap the benefits from extension services. Most extension services have traditionally targeted their resources and interventions towards male farmers. Women extensionists understand the needs and challenges of women farmers, particularly in low- and middle-income countries where 45% of the agriculture workforce is made up of women. They should be invested not only to jumpstart careers but also to support the many women working in food systems that ultimately feed us.

Investing in the people who best understand their communities' needs, be it health or agriculture community workers, is critical to address the challenges that farmers face. However, it won’t be enough to transform global agriculture. Governments, international organizations and the private sector must invest in infrastructure along the entire food supply chain to help farmers grow, store and deliver perishable, nutritious foods. In addition, there is a need to provide farmers the latest climate-smart technologies and tools that would allow them to be resilient when facing natural disasters and other shocks. Insurance and credit are also crucial as safety nets in these uncertain times. That said, face-to-face contact with people exchanging ideas, advice, and knowledge isn’t a bad place to start. So let’s reinvigorate and invest in extensionists.

Time To Invest in Food Systems Science

President Biden’s first budget request when he came into office called for significant investment to science with increased budgets to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the NIH office funding research on climate change and human health. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s budget alone would increase from $647 million to $4 billion to be spent on research, education, and outreach. This is a signal that science will no longer be swept under the rug.

On February 23, 2021, the World Food Prize Foundation released a statement penned by 24 of its Laureates—considered some of the world’s experts on food security—urging the Biden Administration to focus on alleviating hunger, poverty, and malnutrition around the globe. The Laureates called for investments to improve food systems—which feed us—but also are responsible for 30% of greenhouse gas emissions and the generation of diets that are linked to 6 of the top 10 risk factors of the global burden of disease. They urged the U.S. to strengthen and leverage alliances, play a leadership role in the upcoming United Nations Food Systems Summit this September, and refresh evidence-based policymaking. Others have called for the U.S. to transform the food systems as well including the Rockefeller Foundation and renewed engagement marking the 50th anniversary of the 1969 White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health. Some, including academics and former U.S. senators and the Secretary of Agriculture, has gone further to aim for a “moonshot” federal funding for nutrition research.

Can we now please stop using the word “moonshot”?

One way to do that is for the U.S. to invest more in food systems science and research. As several of us wrote in a recent Global Food Security Journal piece, research has a vital role in charting a positive and sustainable direction for global food security, nutrition, and health. At a time when facts, science, and evidence are under ever greater scrutiny, and even openly disregarded as suspect by some political and business leaders (we won’t mention any of the very obvious names), the rigors of research have never been more critical. Research can and does bring about wholesale changes in attitudes, political thought, and action.

Those of us who do research must see their role in terms of knowledge generation and the translation of this knowledge into a form that is relevant to decision-makers in government, business, and civil society.

Those who design, shape, and enact policies need to access the research they need in a digestible and accessible way. Failure to achieve this brings a very considerable risk of being ignored. Researchers must learn to sit at policy dialogue tables not set for them, but the table for the users of their research – that is, the policymakers. It is a table that many researchers are not accustomed to sitting at.

Food systems encapsulate the choices we make about which foods to consume and grow and how we transport, store, process, and market them. These choices profoundly affect outcomes we care about.  To date, the choices all stakeholders make, whether governments, foundations, businesses, civil society, or individual consumers, have relied on fragmented information on food systems, of variable quality, which is difficult to access or use. 

The Food Systems Dashboard is an open-access data platform to address these issues. Created by Johns Hopkins University, the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, and many other collaborators, it launched in June 2020, to attempt to boost the evidence-based decision-making on food systems. The Dashboard is designed to inform decisions that have positive effects on multiple social and environmental challenges simultaneously. Different food choices have different impacts on health, the environment, and livelihoods. There are trade-offs and synergies which need to be surfaced, navigated, and mitigated. For example, different foods have different nutrition values, greenhouse emissions, and different natural resource use implications. In short, the Dashboard is the beginnings of an ambitious “Google Map” for food systems. Let’s hope we make it as navigable and useful over the next decade.

Food systems must adapt and transform to deliver sustainable, healthier diets, and durable livelihoods without decimating the planet. Yes, that is a lot to ask! To do that, we need investment in science, evidence generation, and decision-making tools, like the Food Systems Dashboard, that enable data-driven decision-making in food systems. The Biden Administration has taken a bold step forward to invigorate the various fields of science in the U.S. In turn, the research community should rise to this challenge, and we provide a platform to challenge the status quo and take food system transformation in a direction we may have imagined but are far from realizing.